In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

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There were two notable differences between the Taliban’s religious ideology during the 1990s and their ideology after 2001. The Taliban eased some of their aversion to modern technology. During the 1990s, they generally discouraged the use of the Internet and television by closing down Internet cafes and banning television. After their overthrow, however, they leveraged Al-Sahab, al Qa’ida’s media enterprise, to distribute video propaganda and recruit supporters. Key Taliban leaders, such as Mullah Dadullah Lang, were comfortable and relaxed in front of a camera, reciting passages of the Qur’an and outlining the Taliban’s ideology.

In addition, the Taliban adopted suicide bombing as a tactic against Afghan and international forces with the assistance and encouragement of key al Qa’ida leaders, such as Ayman al-Zawahiri. During the 1990s, the Taliban conducted no suicide attacks, presumably because the Qur’an prohibits suicide. This changed by 2003 and 2004, though not all Taliban appeared to be on board with this new tactic. Signals and human intelligence picked up by NATO officials indicated that there were divisions within the Taliban about the use of suicide attacks. For some, collateral damage—especially when Afghan women and children were killed in the vicinity of a suicide attack—was unjustifiable. Infidels were fair game, but not innocent bystanders. The Taliban’s ideology seemed to be somewhat flexible over time, as long as it served strategic purposes.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami was also active, based out of such areas as the Shamshattu refugee camp near Peshawar.³⁰ He argued that jihad was critical in order to fight Western forces and to establish sharia law in Afghanistan. “Believe me,” he thundered in a video clip in response to questions from Agence France Presse, “we do this jihad as we pray, as we fast, or conduct hajj.”³¹ His daily newspapers, the Sha-haadat Daily and Tanweer Weekly, were available on the streets of Pakistani cities, especially Peshawar. They denounced the Afghan government for apostasy and called Hamid Karzai a puppet of the West. Hekmatyar argued that Western forces were infidels who occupied the land of Muslims. In a video, he proclaimed the United States as “the mother of problems” and warned that Afghanistan’s turmoil would not end until U.S. forces left the region. “The occupying forces…have only one successful way and…that is to pull out of Afghanistan as soon as possible.” In another video,³² Hekmatyar argued that “the Afghan mujahideen have pledged to themselves that they will force America out of their country like the Soviet Union and will not lay down their arms until they drive the occupying forces out of their country.”³³ This comment was notable not only for its anti-American rhetoric but also for its reference to the jihad against the Soviet Union. Hekmatyar, of course, had participated in that war with CIA assistance.

Hekmatyar’s traditional influence was strongest among Pashtun communities in Afghanistan’s northeast. Hezb-i-Islami generally enrolled Pashtuns and was implacably hostile to any form of political compromise with Western countries. From its earliest days, Hezb-i-Islami defined the “good Muslim” as one who was no longer defined by his religious attitude but by his political actions. Following the writings of Ibn Taymiyya, Hekmatyar believed it was possible to define a Muslim as a takfir for purely political reasons.³⁴ This gave Hezb-i-Islami notable credentials with the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi’s Jamiat-e-Islami in Pakistan, and the Saudi networks. Hekmatyar had particularly close ties with Jamiat- e-Islami and its view that the five pillars of Islam were merely phases of preparation for jihad and Islamic revolution. In a sense, their goal was to “Islamize modernity” by domesticating Western techniques and knowledge and putting them to work on behalf of an Islamic state. This differentiated them from Deobandi groups, such as the Taliban, who rejected such modernity out of hand.³⁵ Hekmatyar also adhered to Sayyid Qutb’s views about the need to vanquish corrupt Muslim leaders in order to establish true Islamic government.

Unlike either the Taliban or al Qa’ida, Hezb-i-Islami also became involved in politics. “The influence of Hezb- i-Islami in Afghan politics, including in the Parliament,” one senior Afghan official told me, “is significant.”³⁶ A number of Hezb-i-Islami members were elected to the Afghan Parliament in the September 2005 elections, though many claimed they had broken ranks with Hekmatyar. This suggested that it was not a unified organization. But it allowed Hezb-i-Islami to play a double game: some of its adherents targeted Afghan and NATO forces in the east and some participated in Afghan politics in Kabul and its outlying provinces. Political participation was strongly shunned by al Qa’ida leaders and other Islamists, who considered the democratic political system corrupt and contrary to the establishment of God’s law within a country. In addition, not all members of Hezb-i-Islami agreed on tactical, operational, or strategic decisions of other groups, especially the Taliban. One United Nations report asserted that Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami faction was for the Taliban a “particularly troublesome co-opted group” because “some of its members proved entirely incompatible with the [Taliban’s] ideology and campaign plan.”³⁷

Competing Motivations

The leaders of most major insurgent groups—especially the Taliban, Hezb-i-Islami, and al Qa’ida—were motivated by religion. There were also a number of smaller groups active in Afghanistan and Pakistan that professed somewhat similar ideologies, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The IMU’s leaders were motivated to establish an Islamic state under sharia in Uzbekistan, though they also supported efforts to establish sharia in neighboring countries, including Afghanistan. This religious ideology helps explain why, even after the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001, these groups wanted to target Hamid Karzai’s government.

There were, of course, some tensions and ideological differences across these groups. CIA estimates after the September 11 attacks, for example, found deep divisions between the Taliban and al Qa’ida. Al Qa’ida utilized support from the Taliban for outer-perimeter security, but many al Qa’ida fighters looked disdainfully on the masses of Taliban, and many Taliban viewed al Qa’ida members as unwelcome foreigners. The personal and ideological link between bin Laden and Mullah Omar was crucial to keeping intact an unsteady relationship. ³⁸ Despite these and other differences, however, they shared several common characteristics.³⁹

To begin with, they were jihadist—that is, their supporters advocated the necessity of jihad in order to recover “occupied” Muslim lands, or even to struggle against Muslim regimes regarded as traitorous. They were also loosely Salafist, demanding a return to strict Islam.⁴⁰ Many Salafist movements are opposed to armed jihad, either tactically or by conviction, and advocate the da’wa, or “call” to Islam, as a preferred form of action. For those who advocate both jihad and Salafism, jihad is the way by which Muslims can be united and recalled to the true practice of Islam. The underlying idea is that when the majority of Muslims return to the strict interpretation of Islam, they will be able to reestablish the Muslim umma (the community of all Muslims). In addition, these groups gave the Muslim umma priority over ethnic or national identities and interests. Al Qa’ida leader Abu Laith al-Libi—who was intimately involved in the Afghan insurgency against U.S. forces and was killed in a missile strike in January 2008—argued that in Afghanistan, “the jihad is a story which carries in its twists and turns the just cause of the umma, which seeks in overall terms to establish the religion on earth.”⁴¹ Finally, the groups often overlapped geographically. Although the Taliban had no serious objectives outside the frontiers of Afghanistan, they provided space within their territory for training camps for foreign volunteers and made use of units made up of such volunteers in their military campaigns.⁴²

Insurgent groups used religion as a propaganda tool in at least two respects. The Taliban regularly used arguments that “Western countries are trying to destroy Islam” in their conversations with tribal elders and in their night letters.⁴³ As Mullah Dadullah Lang argued: “God be praised, we now are aware of much of the U.S. plans. We know their target, which is within the general aim of wiping out Islam in this region.”⁴⁴ And the Taliban and other insurgent groups used religion in their recruitment efforts for suicide bombers.

These efforts had mixed success in Afghanistan, but more success in Pakistan. Since mosques historically served as a tipping point for major political upheavals in Afghanistan, Afghan government officials focused their attention on the mosques. One Afghan intelligence report stated: “There are 107 mosques in the city of Kandahar out of which 11 are preaching anti-government themes. Our approach is to have all the pro-government mosques incorporated with the process and work on the eleven anti-government ones to change their attitude or else stop their propaganda and leave the area.”⁴⁵ Another major factor was a public campaign by Afghan religious figures. For example, the Ulema Council of Afghanistan called on the Taliban to abandon violence and support the Afghan government in the name of Islam. They also called on the religious scholars of neighboring countries—including Pakistan—to help counter the activities and ideology of the Taliban and other insurgent